Governor’s kindness led to fatal consequences for town marshal (Part 2 of 2)
Going to prison for a year or two might have saved the city marshal's life — it would have given the rivals some time to cool off, and also...
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Offbeat Oregon History podcast
A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robber...
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20 of 308 episodes
Governor’s kindness led to fatal consequences (Part 1 of 2)
Reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that the governor’s well-intentioned intervention was probably the worst thing that could...
Circuit Preacher Tales III: Longshoreman’s Funeral
The Reverend preached the funeral service to an empty church, while the deceased's friends and colleagues fought in the parking lot over who...
Circuit Preacher Tales II: Shanghaiing up a flock
When trying to minister to the spiritual needs of a crowd of hard-sinning miners and sailors, it was sometimes necessary to resort to unorth...
Circuit Preacher Stories 1: The Rev. Wells’ wild ride
Eagerly, the Reverend leaped into the waiting bathtub, positioned at the top of the stairs in the chilly foyer of the frontier hotel. And th...
Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a comics legend (Part 2 of 2)
ON SEPT. 14, 1964, the steamship Al Kuwait was moored at the dock in Kuwait City when something terrible happened: The ship capsized and set...
Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a comics legend (Part 1 of 2)
SOMETIME IN APRIL of 1960, a shy, retiring, hard-of-hearing comic-book artist named Carl Barks got a letter at his quiet suburban home. When...
Chinese smuggler saved woman and her baby, then vanished
In Gold Rush-era Oregon, the most skilled miners were probably the Chinese — but they were in constant danger. To avoid being robbed, they e...
Fossil ‘Bone Wars’ came to Oregon, but just barely
It's probably just as well that no actual dinosaur bones were found here; the spiteful, unprofessional “cowboy paleontology” practiced by O....
Mill owner’s fight with city sparked a race riot
It's an event remembered with some shame in Oregon: A group of innocent, terrified men and women found themselves at the mercy of an angry m...
Luther Cressman was Oregon’s real-life Indiana Jones (Part 2 of 2)
THE GREAT BREAKTHROUGH in Cressman’s fieldwork came as a direct result of his having familiarized himself with Indian basketmaking art and o...
Luther Cressman was Oregon’s real-life Indiana Jones (Part 1 of 2)
IN THE SUMMER of 1981 a little action-adventure movie titled Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and fans have been speculating ever since on...
Radical Wobblies found support among loggers
Industrial Workers of the World union grew strong in the woods just before the First World War broke out — and the U.S. Army had to teach so...
Shipwrecked fur traders walked from Oregon Coast to Louisiana
While they were ashore, their sailing ship sank in a storm, leaving four fur traders alone in a vast wilderness with no prospects for rescue...
P-town ‘jitney wars’ were monopoly vs. small-biz
Regular motorists would swing by streetcar stops and offer to take passengers faster and in greater comfort for the same nickel. But the com...
Dog's 2,500-mile walk home made Silverton famous
THE TRAVELERS were almost to their destination in Indiana, about 2,300 miles into their road trip, when it happened: Frank was gassing up th...
Bobbie the Wonder Dog put Silverton on the map
BOBBIE THE WONDER Dog, a.k.a. Silverton Bobbie, is still today Silverton’s most famous celebrity. And that’s saying something; the town has...
SPADs, Sopwith Camels made with Oregon spruce
The famous First World War aircraft were made of spruce, and one of the most important sources of the strategic wood for the Allies was the...
Oregon back country is rich in legends of buried treasure
Stories of lost loot and buried booty have kept treasure hunters busy digging for gold in hidden corners of Oregon for the past 150 years. S...
Decade-long dam dispute resolved with dynamite
IN THE SMALL hours of the morning of Aug. 16, 1906, a powerful explosion jolted residents awake near the little town of Willamette, which to...